A digital art installation where glitch art and graffiti merge.

How an experimentation with Clojure, C++, IOT and some monitors turned into something beautiful.

What is Digital Art?

Digital Art can be found in the form of displays in public places, way finding in museums, or simply...art.

Fraqture is an experimental platform that blends art with technology, exploring the parallels between glitch art, which exists on our screens, and graffiti, which lives in the real world. It was originally conceived of as an installation piece for the Durham Storefront Project in collaboration with 21c Museum Hotel.

Smashing Boxes wanted to participate in the Durham Storefront Project by creating an interactive digital art installation that explores the cross-section of art and technology.

Andy Hamilton, Director of Design

Art as a User Interface

Today, Fraqture has grown into an interactive platform that can be adapted to almost any context. During the day, Fraqture uses several algorithms to turn a curated pool of images into glitch art; twisting them, shuffling their pixels and repainting them in an infinite combination of ways. In addition to the curated images, passersby could become a part of the piece by using a forward facing camera to take a picture that glitches into a totally original piece of art and then vanishes for good. At night, when fewer people are passing by, it generates art that doesn't require any images at all by manipulating geometric shapes and even playing classic arcade games by itself.

36

Artists

346

GitHub Commits

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LEDs

How We Did It

Algorithmic Art

The core of Fraqture is a set of algorithms that we developed that animate the canvas by manipulating images and text. We also developed interfaces to third-party software so that we could source media from Twitter and a forward-facing webcam.

Hardware and Firmware Development

We wanted Fraqture’s canvas to be more than just a screen. We decided to break out into the physical realm by building our own custom LED controller. The panels hold 270 LEDs each and were built in-house. In order to talk to our custom controller, we wrote custom firmware that would receive commands from the main application and paint the LEDs.